facilitating Critical Thinking

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Critical Thinking in Fire and EMS Education
Chief Will Chapleau EMT-P, RN, TNS Chicago
Heights Fire Department
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Objectives

• Define Critical thinking
• Recognize critical thinking at work
• Put Critical thinking to work in more of what we
  do

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Critical Thinking

• What is it?

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Critical Thinking is

• the intellectually disciplined process of
  actively and skillfully conceptualizing,
  applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or
  evaluating information gathered from, or
  generated by, observation,
• experience, reflection, reasoning, or
  communication, as a guide to belief and action.

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Or

• Skillful, responsible thinking that facilitates
  good judgement because it
• Relies on criteria
• Is self correcting
• Is sensitive to context

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Critical Thinking is Thinking Effectively
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Effective Thinking

• Welcome problematic situations
• Use active inquiry
• Tolerate ambiguity
• Self critical
• Search for alternatives
• Reflect
• Value rationality

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Effective Thinking cont..

• Perceive thinking as helpful
• Contributory
• Perceive interdependencies

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Ineffective Thinking

• Search for certainty
• Cognitively passive, accepting
• Intolerant of ambiguity
• Not Self Critical
• Tends to be satisfied with first attempts and is
  over confident with initial ideas

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Ineffective Thinking cont.

• Ignores conflicting evidence
• Impulsive
• Values impulsivity
• Perceives thinking as confusing, cumbersome
• Perceives either/ors

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We dont like their sound, and guitar music is
on the way out.
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Decca Records in 1962 about the Beatles
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Do we teach for better thinking?

• If so, then performance is the measure of our
  success.

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Or do we teach for better learning?

• Success measured by traditional results.

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What do we wish for our students?

• To have all the answers?
• To be capable of higher order thinking?

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The difficulty with having all the answers...
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is thinking that we have all the answers!
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640K (Memory) ought to be enough for anybody.
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Bill Gates - 1981
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Higher order thinking

• Non-algorithmic, the path is not specified in
  advance
• Tends to be complex with the total path not
  visible from any single vantage point

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Help students to reason

• They will experience good reasoning and bad
  reasoning.
• Help them to learn to value good reasoning

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Is critical thinking a modern concept?

• Socrates
• Plato
• Thomas Aquinas
• Descartes
• Your favorite teacher
• You and me

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Are there examples of critical thinking in our
classrooms now?

• Lecture
• Skills Labs
• Written evaluations
• Practical Evaluations

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Can we apply what we know about critical thinking
to all of our teaching?
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Scenario based teaching

• Stories help us to become stimulated to apply
  concepts.
• Must be careful that scenario is perceived as a
  vehicle that the student, rather than the
  facilitator controls.

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The role of questions in Thinking, Teaching,
Learning

• Thinking is not driven by answers but by
  questions
• Questions define tasks and delineate issues
• Only students who ask questions, are really
  thinking

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Knowledge needs to be a verb.

• W. Edwards Demming

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Feeding information to memorize

• Like repeatedly stepping on the brakes in a car
  that has already stopped.
• Students need questions to get the car moving
  again
• Thinking is of no use unless it goes somewhere

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Can I ask a stupid question?
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Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?

• Warner Brothers H.M. Warner
• in 1927

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Deep questions

• Take us beneath the surface to deal with
  complexity

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Questions of purpose

• Define our task

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Questions of information

• Sources and quality of information

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Questions of interpretation

• Examines how we are organizing or giving meaning
  to information

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Questions of assumption

• Examines what we take for granted

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Questions of implication

• Forces us to follow out where our thinking is
  going

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Questions of point of view

• Consider our own point of view as well as those
  of others

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Questions of relevance

• Force us to discriminate what does and what does
  not bear on a question

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Questions of accuracy

• Evaluate and test for truth

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Questions indicate the depth of belief.
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The Socratic questioner should

• Keep the discussion focused
• keep the discussion intellectually responsible
• stimulate the discussion with probing questions
• periodically summarize (or let them do it) what
  has or has not been resolved
• Get as many students as possible involved

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Why dont we use critical thinking in all of our
teaching?
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Guilty Victims

• Guilty of teaching to tests
• Algorithmic teaching
• Victims of unrealistic measuring tools
• Victims of tradition

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Tradition

• Sometimes, in following the example of those we
  revere, we are so busy following in their
  footsteps, we fail to grasp where they were going.

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Setting the stage

• Your course concept
• General implementation plan for that concept
• The requirements the students must meet
• Grading policies
• Performance profiles

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Prepare your students

• Written syllabus
• Let them know this will not be a passive learning
  environment
• Orient them to the mechanics of your course

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Prepare yourself

• Know your material
• Be ready for their questions
• Be honest when they stump you
• Let them drive your scenarios

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Tactics

• Daily tactics, things we will do every day
• Episodic tactics, things we will do from time to
  time

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Complex tactics

• Reading critically
• Scenarios
• Self evaluation

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Simple tactics

• Calling on students who dont raise their hands
• Asking students to summarize what other students
  have said
• Requiring students to state the purpose of an
  assignment
• Have students express their questions on the floor

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Overall structural thinking

• Overall structural thinking about your course
  concept can free you up from the didactic model
  into which we have been conditioned and the
  ineffective teaching that invariably accompanies
  it

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Simple and complex

• Simple and complex tactical thinking can provide
  the means by which we can follow through on our
  structural decisions in an effective way

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Believing isnt enough

• We must find practical ways to bring critical
  thinking into instruction both structurally and
  tactically

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Our patients depend on us to be able to think
critically
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They frequently dont know which algorithm they
are supposed to be in
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Confucius says to us,
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Tell me and Ill forget.
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Show me and Ill remember.
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Involve me and Ill understand.
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Accept the challenge

• Involve your students in your classroom

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Its not our job to motivate our students!

• Its our job to create an environment that will
  kindle the fires of our students imagination, to
  get them thinking, and motivating themselves to
  question and learn.

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Teach them to ask questions
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Teach them Critical Thinking
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Questions?
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Chief Will Chapleau EMT-P, RN, TNS Chicago
Heights Fire Department Chairman PHTLS Division
NAEMT Board of Directors NAEMSE Board of
Directors Society of Trauma Nurses
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Sources

• Richard Paul and Linda Elder Critical
  Thinking.org
• Michael Scriven and Richard Paul for National
  Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking
• Edward DeBono, CoRT Thinking Program Workcards
  and Teachers notes. Chicago Science Research
  Associates

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Sources

• Stephen Jay Gould, The Persistently Flat Earth
  Irrationality and Dogmatism are Foes of Both
  Science and Religion
• Timothy J. Melchior and John Edwards, The
  Effects of the CoRT I Thinking Skills Program on
  Student Self Concept as a Thinker

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Websites

• Http//www.shss.montclaire.edu
• http//www.criticalthinking.org